So as some of you might know, I am in my third year of a Creative Writing course at university. I don’t much like it. To tell you all the reasons why would be an entire dissertation so for now I will simply say, it is all pointless.

Last week on a module called Experimental Writing (which sounds pretentious as hell) we spent two and a half hours studying a poem by Gertrude Stein called ‘A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (Read it here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/Courses/Spring02/104/steinpicasso.html. If you can make it to the end without losing a shard of your mind then you are a better person than me. (Or are insane). I lost the will to continue at this point and longed for a strong drink to destroy even the memory of the poem.

That’s when I decided to write my own poem as Stein’s was read out for the fourth time. Its a first drafts so far so here we go.

000 000 000

Ode to the English Education System.

I realise why we students drink

Bullshit

Lest we remember all that

is shovelled uselessly into our brain

Idiocy in Academia’s robes

Oh, why but we the tortured souls

Who listen to minutia incarnate

Pretentious intentions

Interpretations

Intervention for the love of Dog

Drink to dull the ache

The ache that bullshit must create

To me the curtains are forever blue

The interpretation as clear as the vodka in this glass